Hey Chris

I encoded my first CD today with EAC/LAME using --alt-preset standard, and all of the other settings as you recomended in your tute. The CD was "Born Again" by The Notorious B.I.G....

In the car I found the high ends brighter than usual and the bass a little lacking (I have a high-end sound system). In all fairness I have my EQ presets set up for the files I ripped using MM Jukebox...As I listen mostly to Rap / R&B / Hip-Hop, I find that I tend to like a deeper bass.

I re-ripped the CD using MM jukebox and I did find the bass was deeper and the high end had a little less edge the second time around. I feel that maybe because EAC/LAME does such a good job of compression while still retaining excellant sound quality, maybe it's cutting some of the top and bottom off to compensate? My MM Jukebox files average about 5-7MB in size. Over time, I have found that as compression increases, bass tends to disappear and treble fill with tinny artifacts.

Are there any LAME settings I can employ that would give me a fatter bass and take the edge off the highs? I'm not too keen on tweaking my eq again as I just found the "sweet spot" I really like recently.

As a sidenote, I also found that while EAC will extract audio relatively quickly, the LAME encoder seems to go on in the background forever...I sat and watched 18 .wav files slowly become .mp3s over a ten minute period...I didn't want to perform any other activities because I was afraid of corrupting the compression...I know my processor was labouring because my temperature alarm went off, and that's with three case fans and a golden orb on the chip ha ha. BTW, I'm running WinXP, with a Pentium III 1 GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM.

Thanks -